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| American Composers Orchestra (ACO) continues its 38th season with Blues Symphony & Beyond American Composers Orchestra (ACO) continues its 38th season with Blues Symphony & Beyond led by ACO Music Director George Manahan on Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 8pm at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The concert will feature the New York premiere of Blues Symphony by Wynton Marsalis,Managing and Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center (Marsalis does not perform in this work). The concert will also feature the world premiere of Courtney Bryan's Sanctum, commissioned by ACO. Bryan is a past participant in ACO's groundbreaking Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (JCOI), which gives jazz composers the opportunity for vital hands-on experience working with a symphony orchestra. A revised and expanded version of Uri Caine's Double Trouble, featuring the composer at the piano, completes the program. ACO has a deep and continuing interest in the intersection of jazz and symphonic music. A decade ago, ACO created IMPROVISE!, a festival devoted to exploring jazz and improvised musical idioms and the orchestra. In recent years, ACO has often commissioned notable jazz artists to write their first orchestral works, including Steve Coleman, George Lewis, Suzie Ibarra, Henry Threadgill, Donal Fox, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Vijay Iyer. And ACO has previously collaborated with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and performed works by Duke Ellington, Anthony Davis, and Paquito D'Rivera, among many others. ACO's Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (JCOI), of which Blues Symphony & Beyond composer Courtney Bryan is an alumna, continues in 2015. JCOI extends the orchestra's exploration of the intersection of jazz and improvised music and the symphony orchestra. The next installment commences with an Intensive involving 35 jazz composers from August 8-13, 2015. Renowned flutist and composer James Newton directs the program, which is produced in collaboration with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. Participants in the Intensive will include some of the most forward-looking jazz composers working today, selected from submissions nationwide. The Intensive will feature seminars led by visiting composers and conductors working in both jazz and classical music, and will address various topics related to the 21st-century orchestra such as composition and notation techniques, electronics, improvisation, and a historical review of American orchestral music. JCOI aims to provide new resources for both jazz and classical music, promoting the emergence of composers trained in both jazz and new orchestral techniques. Applications are now being accepted. Details can be found at: http://www.americancomposers.org/jcoi. This is the third installment of the JCOI program and it remains a unique development in the jazz field. While many jazz composers seek to write for the symphony orchestra, opportunities for hands-on experience are few. The first JCOI, which took place in New York during the 2010-2011 season, was the subject of two features on National Public Radio, which reported that what the composers discovered while at the Institute has "the potential to shift the course of concert music." Listen online at: www.npr.org/2010/12/19/132146455/teaching-the-symphony-to-swing Founded in 1977, American Composers Orchestra remains the only orchestra in the world dedicated exclusively to the creation, performance, preservation, and promulgation of music by American composers. To date, ACO has performed music by more than 700 American composers, including more than 300 world premieres and newly commissioned works. Wynton Marsalis: Blues Symphony (New York Premiere) For more information: www.wyntonmarsalis.org Wynton Marsalis is the Managing and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and a world-renowned band leader and composer. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1961, Marsalis began his classical training on trumpet at age 12 and soon began playing in local bands of diverse genres. He entered The Juilliard School at age 17 and later joined Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Marsalis made his recording debut as a leader in 1982, and since then he has recorded more than 30 jazz and classical recordings, which have won him nine Grammy Awards. In 1983, he became the first and only artist to win both classical and jazz Grammys in the same year and repeated this feat in 1984. In 1997, Marsalis became the first jazz artist to be awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in music, for his oratorio Blood on the Fields, which was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center. In addition to composer, musician, bandleader, Marsalis is an internationally recognized educator and spokesperson for music education and arts advocacy. He has received honorary doctorates from over 25 universities and colleges throughout the U.S. and is the author of six books. In 2001, Marsalis was appointed Messenger of Peace by Mr. Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and he has also been designated cultural ambassador to the United States of America by the U.S. State Department through their CultureConnect program. He helped lead the effort to construct Jazz at Lincoln Center's home – Frederick P. Rose Hall – the first education, performance, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz, which opened in October 2004. Marsalis' Blues Symphony (Symphony No. 2) celebrates the blues through the prism of different moments in American history. Each movement is designed to be in the form of 12-bar blues choruses with variations and specific sounds related to historical reference points. Marsalis says, "It incorporates the call and responses, train whistles, stomp-down grooves, big-city complexities and down-home idiosyncrasies of Afro-American and American music. Like most New Orleans musicians, I grew up surrounded by vernacular music and love the plain-spokenness of it all." Marsalis last collaborated with ACO in 2006 when the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra joined ACO in a program of Gershwin and the world premiere of The Migration Series by Derek Bermel. Uri Caine: Double Trouble (World Premiere, Revised & Expanded Version, ACO Commission) For more information: www.uricaine.com Uri Caine was born in Philadelphia and began studying piano with Bernard Peiffer. He played in bands led by Philly Joe Jones, Hank Mobley, Johnny Coles, Mickey Roker, Odean Pope, Jymmie Merritt, Bootsie Barnes and Grover Washington. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and studied music composition with George Rochberg and George Crumb. Caine has recorded 25 albums as a leader including recordings featuring his jazz trio, his Bedrock Trio, and his ensemble performing arrangements of Mahler, Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, and Schumann. In addition to ACO, he has received commissions from the Vienna Volksoper, The Seattle Chamber Players, Relache, The Beaux Arts Trio, the Basel Chamber Orchestra, and Concerto Koln. He has received grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pew Foundation. Caine’s work Double Trouble For Piano and Orchestra was commissioned by American Composers Orchestra in 2008; this performance will be the premiere of a revised version for expanded forces. Double Trouble sets up a dialogue between composed music written mostly for the orchestra and improvisation, mostly by the piano soloist. Of the work, Caine says, “The piece is a mini piano concerto in the sense that there is a constant give-and-take between the piano and the orchestra. In five short but continuous sections, the piano comments on and seeks to transform musical material presented by the orchestra, especially in the solo cadenzas. Sometimes the piano is part of the ensemble, sometimes it moves in a parallel but distinct musical space, and sometimes it moves in direct opposition and in contrast to the orchestra. The orchestra functions as a rhythm section and set up textures that invite improvisation from the soloist.” Courtney Bryan: Sanctum (World Premiere, ACO/Jerome/Heller Commission) Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, is a prolific and eclectic composer, pianist, and arranger. Her compositions range from solo works to large ensembles in the jazz and new music idioms, film scores, and collaborations of dancers, visual artists, writers, and actors. Byran was a participant in ACO’s Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute. She has academic degrees from Oberlin Conservatory ’04 (BM), Rutgers University ’07 (MM), and Columbia University ’09 (MA). Recently, Bryan was a Visiting Instructor at Oberlin Conservatory. Currently, she is pursuing a DMA in music composition at Columbia University of New York. Bryan’s work for ACO, Sanctum for orchestra and recorded sound, explores the sound of improvisation in Holiness-preaching traditions, and draws inspiration from Pastor Shirley Caesar’s 1973 recorded sermon, “The Praying Slave Lady, ” about an enslaved woman protected from the slave master’s whips by her unrelenting faith in God and the intervention of a host of spirits. Bryan says, “By employing techniques of layered repetition, rhythmic intensity, and sounds of moaning and whooping, Sanctum invokes solace found in the midst of persecution and tribulation.” About George Manahan, ACO Music Director In his fifth season as Music Director of the American Composers Orchestra, the wide-ranging and versatile George Manahan has had an esteemed career embracing everything from opera to the concert stage, the traditional to the contemporary. In addition to his work with ACO, Manahan continues his commitment to working with young musicians as Director of Orchestral Studies at the Manhattan School of Music as well as guest conductor at the Curtis Institute of Music. He also serves as Music Director of the Portland Opera. Manahan was Music Director at New York City Opera for fourteen sea write your comments about the article :: © 2015 Jazz News :: home page |